It was time for another new book to go on sale.
People often used to ask Tingri why he hadn't started a new book even after two years, and why he was so lazy.
Actually, I'd written many openings over the past two years. But how should I put it? They were all things I personally liked, but there wasn't much commercial guarantee. They were probably somewhere between Azure and Death Substitute in quality. But now I'm a great author, so I have the baggage that comes with being one, along with a tendency to aim too high while lacking the skill to match. So I kept rejecting one idea after another. Of course, there was also the small matter of how wonderful vacations were. Whenever I traveled with other authors, being the only one who didn't have to write was incredibly pleasurable.
Herald of Calamity was inspired by the idea of "gamifying the real world." There are quite a few books of this type, and some of them are especially well written, but none of them managed to produce the feeling I wanted in their later stages. The difference between an author and a reader is that when I find an author has written something different from what I imagined, I write a book according to my own ideas.
Likewise, the inspiration for Mage's Handbook also came from You Zhu's Girl, Something's Not Right With You. What people call the impulse to create often stems from pointing fingers at other books.
This book is different from the previous ones in several ways, but the main difference is that all the female leads appear in the very first chapter. Yan Qing isn't the prison-experience guinea pig Ash, nor is he the ace pilot Le Yu, and he's certainly not Ren